Kiwanis Park incinerator: Blight or historical site?

YAKIMA, Wash. -- The old garbage incinerator at Yakima's Kiwanis Park was not in service for very long -- just six years, from 1936 to 1942.

Ever since then it's sat unused, unappreciated and unloved. Or, as a 1949 story in the Yakima Daily Republic described it, "An abandoned, boarded-up mass of masonry."

But that short life span and its more recent history as a magnet for graffiti and vandalism is offset by its status as a New Deal-era symbol of civic improvement and public health, say preservationists.

Championed by City Councilman Bill Lover, they are hopeful the entire council will soon approve their petition to place the big brick building and its landmark smokestack on the Yakima Register of Historic Places.

"This was the first time that Yakima said, 'We're going to develop a system whereby we take care of our environment,'" explained chief petitioner Nancy Kenmotsu, a professional archeologist and member of the city's Historical Preservation Commission.

"There were a lot of statements in the newspaper articles talking about how much of an eyesore landfills were," Kenmotsu said.

City leaders already recognized that most of the garbage was ending up in the river, with hazardous consequences.

"There was a serious problem with drinking water here," she said. "In fact people were becoming extremely ill from it. They were having to truck in water.

"So the mayor said, we need to do this."

That mayor was Harry C. Temple, who in 1935 was head of the three-man commission style of government that predated Yakima's current council-
manager system.

In an effort to improve sanitation, Temple and his colleagues on the commission transformed the city's fledgling garbage service into a public utility and ordered the issuance of revenue bonds to build an incinerator and acquire garbage trucks. Incineration technology, although age-old -- humans have been burning their garbage since the dawn of time -- nevertheless was cutting edge for its day. Today it's still popular in land-poor countries like Japan and Denmark.

Based on research by Kenmotsu and neighborhood historian/activist Maud Scott, local preservationists argue the two-story brick incinerator meets several criteria for inclusion on the city's Register of Historic Places.

For one thing, it's old -- 76 years and going. For another, its price tag of $49,645 was underwritten partly with federal funding from the Works Progress Administration and its New Deal rival, the Public Works Administration, making it a historical symbol of the Depression-era and the administration of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The incinerator is also an excellent example of craftsmanship by the Pittsburgh-Des Moines Steel Co., then one of the leading builders of incinerators in the country. Another Pittsburgh-based firm, The Rust Engineering Co., built the
120-foot smokestack.

"It's been an icon there at that location since it was built, and it's still in remarkably wonderful shape," said Kenmotsu. "Some of the glass in the panes in the windows has been broken, but otherwise the building is essentially sound."

But perhaps its true achievement is as a symbol of environmental progress.

According to Kenmotsu, city officials by the mid-1930s were becoming increasingly concerned with existing waste disposal systems.

Prior to construction of the incinerator, household and municipal waste were often discarded at private, often informal and unregulated, landfills outside the city or on the fringes of farmlands.

The city operated a dump at the site, near the corner of present-day Fair Avenue and Maple Street. News accounts of the day were not complimentary.

"Construction of the garbage incinerator is the first step in cleaning up the present city dump," read a Daily Republic story in 1935, which described the dump as "infested with rats" and a "feeding ground for swine" that "aids in stream pollution of the Yakima river" as well as being "unsightly and a menace to public health."

Unfortunately, the new incinerator never quite worked as promised. It didn't get hot enough, and residents were required to sort combustibles from non-combustibles, which were tossed into the adjacent landfill. By 1942 the experiment had failed.

"The big trouble with the incinerator ... was that its fires were not hot enough to consume all the garbage, such as the tons and tons of fruit waste from industrial establishments and discarded materials," the Daily Republic reported in 1949.

"During the few years the incinerator was in operation, residents were supposed to keep their burnable garbage, such as paper and food waste, in one garbage can and their unburnable, such as bottles, can and metals, in another ... That was a hard rule to enforce, according to city officials, and it frequently angered householders."

Shutting down the operation solved one problem but created another. Within just a few years, local residents were becoming annoyed with the idled plant.

In fact, by 1949 the topic had become "so touchy," according to the Daily Republic, that talk of reviving the incinerator "is threatening to produce an official headache in city hall."

"I wish someone would put a bomb under it," one unnamed city official told the paper.

Sixty-two years later, that loathe-hate relationship with the incinerator survives in the hearts and minds of many employees of the city's Parks and Rec department.

No longer a warmed-over dump, Kiwanis Park today is one of the city's finest green spaces. It sports a basketball court, skate park, playground and a series of professionally landscaped softball fields.

Parks staff have long seen the incinerator as an eyesore, an impediment to the redevelopment of the park and, worst of all, a magnet for vandalism.

On a recent tour of the structure, no-nonsense maintenance specialist Mike Byers said vandals tag the building on a weekly if not daily basis. The lowest rungs on the smokestack had to be removed to keep vandals off.

"Right now it's a catchall for graffiti," he said, adding, however, that "It's nice for storage."

Asked about the significance of the structure, Byers said he's not against preservation and sees the thinking behind the recent listing of the entire Barge-Chestnut neighborhood as an historic district.

"But I don't know about this thing," he said of the incinerator. "I guess there's not a lot of old in Yakima."

Kenmotsu said protecting some of the old in Yakima is important as a way to learn about and be mindful of history. Regardless of its short working life, the incinerator has value in that regard and remains structurally sound despite years of neglect.

"If we don't take care of some of the older properties, then we're teaching our children that the past doesn't matter," she said, "And it does matter."

* Chris Bristol can be reached at 509-577-7748 or cbristol@yakimaherald.com.